Students For Academic Freedom

Is Academic Freedom a License to Indoctrinate? · 03 January 2011

I woke up this morning in a dream in which I was touring a large university with a guide. In good dream-logic, we were starting from the roof of a main building and descending floor by floor. On the top floor, I was impressed to see students in practice rooms learning to play drums, flailing away in various arrhythmic spasms. Good, I thought. They are getting a feel for the instrument. Then we descended to the next floor, and I was surprised to find more practice rooms with more students beating out senseless stuff on drums, no teacher in sight, and their thumps combining to a sound like an all-out war among sous-chefs. Then we descended another floor—more aimless drummers. And another, and another, and another. It was drummers idiotically drumming all the way down. The last thing I remember is asking my guide what else the university taught. He answered, of course, “We believe each student should follow his own beat.”

As I woke up and looked out the window, and at the break of dawn a surveyor was setting up his theodolite at the end of my driveway. A vision of quiet order taking the measure of things: I had escaped the inferno and was back on terra firma.

But then I remembered. Stanley Fish had used his New York Times Opinionator blog on Monday to declare, “We’re All Conservatives Now.” Fish’s declaration was the latest twist in the tale of Penn State’s decision to mutilate its academic freedom policy, HR64, to make clear that faculty members have no particular obligation to avoid indoctrinating students “with ready made conclusions on controversial subjects.” That was one clause eliminated from Penn State’s academic freedom policy, but not the only one. The redactors also decided it is no longer proper to call on faculty members to demonstrate “a fair and judicial mind” in presenting information; or to avoid subjecting divergent opinions to “suppression or innuendo.” And they decided to scrub the provisions that enjoined a Penn State faculty member not to use the classroom to discuss “controversial topics outside his/her own field;” and not to take advantage of professorial authority to introduce into the classroom “provocative discussions of irrelevant subjects.”

The Penn State Controversy

It is not clear that Penn State faculty members as a whole were inconvenienced by the old restrictions. The more ideologically aggressive members of the faculty probably ignored the policy and went right ahead using their classrooms to promote their political views, ignore or attack divergent opinions they disliked, and launch into topics remote from the subjects they were supposed to be teaching. But now they will be able to do that with an air of legitimacy.

My organization, the National Association of Scholars, posted on its Web site a dissenting view, “Free to Indoctrinate.” We take the view that the revisions are a troublesome invitation to faculty members to engage in conduct that serves students poorly and ultimately undermines academic freedom. Preserving that freedom is crucial for higher education, and to that end we need to maintain and wherever possible strengthen its foundation in the disciplined pursuit of truth. Opening the door even wider than it already is to using the classroom for ideological cant doesn’t expand academic freedom. Rather, it vitiates the principle that faculty members are sufficiently self-disciplined and committed to the responsibilities of fair-minded teaching that they deserve a large degree of autonomy.

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